The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nonsense Books, by Edward Lear
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Lear - Nonsense
?
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nonsense Books, by Edward Lear
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www. gutenberg. net
Title: Nonsense Books
Author: Edward Lear
Release Date: October 8, 2004 [eBook #13650]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONSENSE BOOKS***
E-text prepared by Dave Newman, Ben Courtney, A. Deubelbeiss, Stan
Goodman, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which
includes the original illustrations and music clips as well as
midi, pdf, and lilypond files.
See 13650-h. htm or 13650-h. zip:
(http://www. gutenberg. net/dirs/1/3/6/5/13650/13650-h/13650-h. htm)
or
(http://www. gutenberg. net/dirs/1/3/6/5/13650/13650-h. zip)
NONSENSE BOOKS
by
EDWARD LEAR
With all the Original Illustrations
1894
PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.
The first _Book of Nonsense_ was published in 1846. Three other volumes,--
_Nonsense Songs, Stories, etc. _, published in 1871; _More Nonsense
Pictures, etc. _, in 1872; and _Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense,
etc. _, in 1877,--comprise all the "Nonsense Books" written by Mr. Lear.
"Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books
yet produced is the _Book of Nonsense_, with its corollary
carols, inimitable and refreshing, and perfect in rhythm.
I really don't know any author to whom I am half so
grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put
him first of my hundred authors. "
JOHN RUSKIN,
In the _List of the Best Hundred Authors_.
[Illustration: EDWARD LEAR. ENGRAVED BY ANDREW FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN
SAN REMO, BY RONCAROLO. ]
CONTENTS.
I. A BOOK OF NONSENSE.
II. NONSENSE SONGS, STORIES, BOTANY, AND ALPHABETS.
III. MORE NONSENSE PICTURES, RHYMES, BOTANY, ETC.
IV. LAUGHABLE LYRICS:
A FRESH BOOK OF NONSENSE POEMS, SONGS, BOTANY, ETC.
[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT. ]
The following lines by Mr. Lear were written for a young lady of his
acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady not of his
acquaintance,
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlor,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, "He's come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh! "
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in
various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of
Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on
Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty
years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their
appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he
was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance,
and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds
of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for
personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was
impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the
Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted
with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately,
although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.
Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoological
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoological Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley. " Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientele_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his
garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that
he was careless of comfort and health. Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of
Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos,
Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was? ), were
as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities
of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu. He read insatiably before starting all the
recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw;
and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary
interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations. And he had his reward.
It is not any ordinary journalist and sketcher who could have compelled
from Tennyson such a tribute as lines "To E. L. on his Travels in Greece":--
"Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
"Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there. "
Lear was a man to whom, as to Tennyson's Ulysses,
"All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world. "
After settling at San Remo, and when he was nearly sixty years old, he
determined to visit India and Ceylon. He started once and failed, being
taken so ill at Suez that he was obliged to return. The next year he
succeeded, and brought away some thousands of drawings of the most striking
views from all three Presidencies and from the tropical island. His
appetite for travel continued to grow with what it fed upon; and although
he hated a long sea-voyage, he used seriously to contemplate as possible a
visit to relations in New Zealand. It may safely, however, be averred that
no considerations would have tempted him to visit the Arctic regions.
A hard-working life, checkered by the odd adventures which happen
to the odd and the adventurous and pass over the commonplace; a
career brightened by the high appreciation of unimpeachable
critics; lightened, till of late, by the pleasant society and good
wishes of innumerable friends; saddened by the growing pressure of
ill health and solitude; cheered by his constant trust in the love
and sympathy of those who knew him best, however far away,--such
was the life of Edward Lear.
--_The London Saturday Review,_ Feb. 4, 1888.
Among the writers who have striven with varying success during the last
thirty or forty years to awaken the merriment of the "rising generation" of
the time being, Mr. Edward Lear occupies the first place in seniority, if
not in merit. The parent of modern nonsense-writers, he is distinguished
from all his followers and imitators by the superior consistency with which
he has adhered to his aim,--that of amusing his readers by fantastic
absurdities, as void of vulgarity or cynicism as they are incapable of
being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into
sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation.
He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they
are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous
appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of
a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even
melodious--or, as he would say, _meloobious_--while to all these
qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of
pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the
laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest
designs. Generally speaking, these designs are, as it were, an idealization
of the efforts of a clever child; but now and then--as in the case of the
nonsense-botany--Mr. Lear reminds us what a genuine and graceful artist he
really is. The advantage to a humorist of being able to illustrate his own
text has been shown in the case of Thackeray and Mr. W. S. Gilbert, to
mention two familiar examples; but in no other instance of such a
combination have we discovered such geniality as is to be found in the
nonsense-pictures of Mr. Lear. We have spoken above of the melodiousness of
Mr. Lear's verses, a quality which renders them excellently suitable for
musical setting, and which has not escaped the notice of the author
himself. We have also heard effective arrangements, presumably by other
composers, of the adventures of the Table and the Chair, and of the cruise
of the Owl and the Pussy-cat,--the latter introduced into the "drawing-room
entertainment" of one of the followers of John Parry. Indeed, in these days
of adaptations, it is to be wondered at that no enterprising librettist has
attempted to build a children's comic opera out of the materials supplied
in the four books with which we are now concerned. The first of these,
originally published in 1846, and brought out in an enlarged form in 1863,
is exclusively devoted to nonsense-verses of one type. Mr. Lear is careful
to disclaim the credit of having created this type, for he tells us in the
preface to his third book that "the lines beginning, 'There was an old man
of Tobago,' were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse
leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures. " Dismissing
the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago,"
we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as
exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a
favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as
it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for "owls" in the
third line:
"There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard! '"
With the kindly fatalism which is the distinctive note of the foregoing
stanza, the sentiment of our next extract is in vivid contrast:--
"There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was terribly bored by a bee;
When they said, 'Does it buzz? ' he replied, 'Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee. '"
To the foregoing verse an historic interest attaches, if, that is, we are
right in supposing it to have inspired Mr. Gilbert with his famous
"Nonsense-Rhyme in Blank Verse. " We quote from memory:--
"There was an Old Man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, 'Does it hurt? ' he replied, 'No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet! '"
Passing over the lines referring to the "Young Person" of Crete to whom the
epithet "ombliferous" is applied, we may be pardoned--on the ground of the
geographical proximity of the two countries named--for quoting together two
stanzas which in reality are separated by a good many pages:--
"There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the doors queezed her flat, she exclaimed, 'What of that? '
This courageous young person of Norway. "
"There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, 'Weedon Station! ' she made no observation,
But thought she should go back to Sweden. "
A noticeable feature about this first book, and one which we think is
peculiar to it, is the harsh treatment which the eccentricities of the
inhabitants of certain towns appear to have met with at the hands of their
fellow-residents. No less than three people are "smashed,"--the Old Man of
Whitehaven "who danced a quadrille with a Raven;" the Old Person of Buda;
and the Old Man with a gong "who bumped at it all the day long," though in
the last-named case we admit that there was considerable provocation.
Before quitting the first "Nonsense-Book," we would point out that it
contains one or two forms that are interesting; for instance, "scroobious,"
which we take to be a Portmanteau word, and "spickle-speckled," a favorite
form of reduplication with Mr. Lear, and of which the best specimen occurs
in his last book, "He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled the bell. " The second book,
published in 1871, shows Mr. Lear in the maturity of sweet desipience, and
will perhaps remain the favorite volume of the four to grown-up readers.
The nonsense-songs are all good, and "The Story of the Four little Children
who went Round the World" is the most exquisite piece of imaginative
absurdity that the present writer is acquainted with. But before coming to
that, let us quote a few lines from "The Jumblies," who, as all the world
knows, went to sea in a sieve:--
"They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-Daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve. _
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, 'How tall they've grown!
For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore. '"
From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist
making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability
to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:--
"So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air! '
"But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
"Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon! '
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds. "
"The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World" follows
next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while
on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate
persons who have not perused the original: "During the day-time Violet
chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her
three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter,
which it seldom if ever did. " After journeying for a time, they saw some
land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high. " In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found. "
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells. " This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust . . . suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers . . . till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite. "
In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense. " In this
volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum. " In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--
"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.
The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further
quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following
set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr.
Lear's books has drawn up for us:--
1. What do you gather from a study of Mr. Lear's works to
have been the prevalent characteristics of the inhabitants of
Gretna, Prague, Thermopylae, Wick, and Hong Kong?
2. State briefly what historical events are connected with
Ischia, Chertsey, Whitehaven, Boulak, and Jellibolee.
3. Comment, with illustrations, upon Mr. Lear's use of the
following words: Runcible, propitious, dolomphious, borascible,
fizzgiggious, himmeltanious, tumble-dum-down, spongetaneous.
4. Enumerate accurately all the animals who lived on the
Quangle Wangle's Hat, and explain how the Quangle Wangle
was enabled at once to enlighten his five travelling companions
as to the true nature of the Co-operative Cauliflower.
5. What were the names of the five daughters of the Old
Person of China, and what was the purpose for which the
Old Man of the Dargle purchased six barrels of Gargle?
6. Collect notices of King Xerxes in Mr. Lear's works, and
state your theory, if you have any, as to the character and
appearance of Nupiter Piffkin.
7.
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nonsense Books, by Edward Lear
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www. gutenberg. net
Title: Nonsense Books
Author: Edward Lear
Release Date: October 8, 2004 [eBook #13650]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONSENSE BOOKS***
E-text prepared by Dave Newman, Ben Courtney, A. Deubelbeiss, Stan
Goodman, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which
includes the original illustrations and music clips as well as
midi, pdf, and lilypond files.
See 13650-h. htm or 13650-h. zip:
(http://www. gutenberg. net/dirs/1/3/6/5/13650/13650-h/13650-h. htm)
or
(http://www. gutenberg. net/dirs/1/3/6/5/13650/13650-h. zip)
NONSENSE BOOKS
by
EDWARD LEAR
With all the Original Illustrations
1894
PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.
The first _Book of Nonsense_ was published in 1846. Three other volumes,--
_Nonsense Songs, Stories, etc. _, published in 1871; _More Nonsense
Pictures, etc. _, in 1872; and _Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense,
etc. _, in 1877,--comprise all the "Nonsense Books" written by Mr. Lear.
"Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books
yet produced is the _Book of Nonsense_, with its corollary
carols, inimitable and refreshing, and perfect in rhythm.
I really don't know any author to whom I am half so
grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put
him first of my hundred authors. "
JOHN RUSKIN,
In the _List of the Best Hundred Authors_.
[Illustration: EDWARD LEAR. ENGRAVED BY ANDREW FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN
SAN REMO, BY RONCAROLO. ]
CONTENTS.
I. A BOOK OF NONSENSE.
II. NONSENSE SONGS, STORIES, BOTANY, AND ALPHABETS.
III. MORE NONSENSE PICTURES, RHYMES, BOTANY, ETC.
IV. LAUGHABLE LYRICS:
A FRESH BOOK OF NONSENSE POEMS, SONGS, BOTANY, ETC.
[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT. ]
The following lines by Mr. Lear were written for a young lady of his
acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady not of his
acquaintance,
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlor,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, "He's come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh! "
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in
various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of
Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on
Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty
years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their
appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he
was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance,
and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds
of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for
personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was
impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the
Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted
with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately,
although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.
Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoological
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoological Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley. " Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientele_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his
garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that
he was careless of comfort and health. Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of
Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos,
Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was? ), were
as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities
of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu. He read insatiably before starting all the
recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw;
and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary
interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations. And he had his reward.
It is not any ordinary journalist and sketcher who could have compelled
from Tennyson such a tribute as lines "To E. L. on his Travels in Greece":--
"Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
"Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there. "
Lear was a man to whom, as to Tennyson's Ulysses,
"All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world. "
After settling at San Remo, and when he was nearly sixty years old, he
determined to visit India and Ceylon. He started once and failed, being
taken so ill at Suez that he was obliged to return. The next year he
succeeded, and brought away some thousands of drawings of the most striking
views from all three Presidencies and from the tropical island. His
appetite for travel continued to grow with what it fed upon; and although
he hated a long sea-voyage, he used seriously to contemplate as possible a
visit to relations in New Zealand. It may safely, however, be averred that
no considerations would have tempted him to visit the Arctic regions.
A hard-working life, checkered by the odd adventures which happen
to the odd and the adventurous and pass over the commonplace; a
career brightened by the high appreciation of unimpeachable
critics; lightened, till of late, by the pleasant society and good
wishes of innumerable friends; saddened by the growing pressure of
ill health and solitude; cheered by his constant trust in the love
and sympathy of those who knew him best, however far away,--such
was the life of Edward Lear.
--_The London Saturday Review,_ Feb. 4, 1888.
Among the writers who have striven with varying success during the last
thirty or forty years to awaken the merriment of the "rising generation" of
the time being, Mr. Edward Lear occupies the first place in seniority, if
not in merit. The parent of modern nonsense-writers, he is distinguished
from all his followers and imitators by the superior consistency with which
he has adhered to his aim,--that of amusing his readers by fantastic
absurdities, as void of vulgarity or cynicism as they are incapable of
being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into
sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation.
He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they
are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous
appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of
a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even
melodious--or, as he would say, _meloobious_--while to all these
qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of
pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the
laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest
designs. Generally speaking, these designs are, as it were, an idealization
of the efforts of a clever child; but now and then--as in the case of the
nonsense-botany--Mr. Lear reminds us what a genuine and graceful artist he
really is. The advantage to a humorist of being able to illustrate his own
text has been shown in the case of Thackeray and Mr. W. S. Gilbert, to
mention two familiar examples; but in no other instance of such a
combination have we discovered such geniality as is to be found in the
nonsense-pictures of Mr. Lear. We have spoken above of the melodiousness of
Mr. Lear's verses, a quality which renders them excellently suitable for
musical setting, and which has not escaped the notice of the author
himself. We have also heard effective arrangements, presumably by other
composers, of the adventures of the Table and the Chair, and of the cruise
of the Owl and the Pussy-cat,--the latter introduced into the "drawing-room
entertainment" of one of the followers of John Parry. Indeed, in these days
of adaptations, it is to be wondered at that no enterprising librettist has
attempted to build a children's comic opera out of the materials supplied
in the four books with which we are now concerned. The first of these,
originally published in 1846, and brought out in an enlarged form in 1863,
is exclusively devoted to nonsense-verses of one type. Mr. Lear is careful
to disclaim the credit of having created this type, for he tells us in the
preface to his third book that "the lines beginning, 'There was an old man
of Tobago,' were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse
leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures. " Dismissing
the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago,"
we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as
exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a
favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as
it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for "owls" in the
third line:
"There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard! '"
With the kindly fatalism which is the distinctive note of the foregoing
stanza, the sentiment of our next extract is in vivid contrast:--
"There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was terribly bored by a bee;
When they said, 'Does it buzz? ' he replied, 'Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee. '"
To the foregoing verse an historic interest attaches, if, that is, we are
right in supposing it to have inspired Mr. Gilbert with his famous
"Nonsense-Rhyme in Blank Verse. " We quote from memory:--
"There was an Old Man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, 'Does it hurt? ' he replied, 'No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet! '"
Passing over the lines referring to the "Young Person" of Crete to whom the
epithet "ombliferous" is applied, we may be pardoned--on the ground of the
geographical proximity of the two countries named--for quoting together two
stanzas which in reality are separated by a good many pages:--
"There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the doors queezed her flat, she exclaimed, 'What of that? '
This courageous young person of Norway. "
"There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, 'Weedon Station! ' she made no observation,
But thought she should go back to Sweden. "
A noticeable feature about this first book, and one which we think is
peculiar to it, is the harsh treatment which the eccentricities of the
inhabitants of certain towns appear to have met with at the hands of their
fellow-residents. No less than three people are "smashed,"--the Old Man of
Whitehaven "who danced a quadrille with a Raven;" the Old Person of Buda;
and the Old Man with a gong "who bumped at it all the day long," though in
the last-named case we admit that there was considerable provocation.
Before quitting the first "Nonsense-Book," we would point out that it
contains one or two forms that are interesting; for instance, "scroobious,"
which we take to be a Portmanteau word, and "spickle-speckled," a favorite
form of reduplication with Mr. Lear, and of which the best specimen occurs
in his last book, "He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled the bell. " The second book,
published in 1871, shows Mr. Lear in the maturity of sweet desipience, and
will perhaps remain the favorite volume of the four to grown-up readers.
The nonsense-songs are all good, and "The Story of the Four little Children
who went Round the World" is the most exquisite piece of imaginative
absurdity that the present writer is acquainted with. But before coming to
that, let us quote a few lines from "The Jumblies," who, as all the world
knows, went to sea in a sieve:--
"They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-Daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve. _
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, 'How tall they've grown!
For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore. '"
From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist
making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability
to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:--
"So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air! '
"But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
"Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon! '
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds. "
"The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World" follows
next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while
on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate
persons who have not perused the original: "During the day-time Violet
chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her
three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter,
which it seldom if ever did. " After journeying for a time, they saw some
land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high. " In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found. "
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells. " This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust . . . suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers . . . till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite. "
In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense. " In this
volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum. " In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--
"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.
The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further
quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following
set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr.
Lear's books has drawn up for us:--
1. What do you gather from a study of Mr. Lear's works to
have been the prevalent characteristics of the inhabitants of
Gretna, Prague, Thermopylae, Wick, and Hong Kong?
2. State briefly what historical events are connected with
Ischia, Chertsey, Whitehaven, Boulak, and Jellibolee.
3. Comment, with illustrations, upon Mr. Lear's use of the
following words: Runcible, propitious, dolomphious, borascible,
fizzgiggious, himmeltanious, tumble-dum-down, spongetaneous.
4. Enumerate accurately all the animals who lived on the
Quangle Wangle's Hat, and explain how the Quangle Wangle
was enabled at once to enlighten his five travelling companions
as to the true nature of the Co-operative Cauliflower.
5. What were the names of the five daughters of the Old
Person of China, and what was the purpose for which the
Old Man of the Dargle purchased six barrels of Gargle?
6. Collect notices of King Xerxes in Mr. Lear's works, and
state your theory, if you have any, as to the character and
appearance of Nupiter Piffkin.
7. Draw pictures of the Plum-pudding flea, and the Moppsikon
Floppsikon Bear, and state by whom waterproof tubs
were first used.
8.
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Title: Nonsense Books
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NONSENSE BOOKS
by
EDWARD LEAR
With all the Original Illustrations
1894
PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.
The first _Book of Nonsense_ was published in 1846. Three other volumes,--
_Nonsense Songs, Stories, etc. _, published in 1871; _More Nonsense
Pictures, etc. _, in 1872; and _Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense,
etc. _, in 1877,--comprise all the "Nonsense Books" written by Mr. Lear.
"Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books
yet produced is the _Book of Nonsense_, with its corollary
carols, inimitable and refreshing, and perfect in rhythm.
I really don't know any author to whom I am half so
grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put
him first of my hundred authors. "
JOHN RUSKIN,
In the _List of the Best Hundred Authors_.
[Illustration: EDWARD LEAR. ENGRAVED BY ANDREW FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN
SAN REMO, BY RONCAROLO. ]
CONTENTS.
I. A BOOK OF NONSENSE.
II. NONSENSE SONGS, STORIES, BOTANY, AND ALPHABETS.
III. MORE NONSENSE PICTURES, RHYMES, BOTANY, ETC.
IV. LAUGHABLE LYRICS:
A FRESH BOOK OF NONSENSE POEMS, SONGS, BOTANY, ETC.
[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT. ]
The following lines by Mr. Lear were written for a young lady of his
acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady not of his
acquaintance,
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlor,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, "He's come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh! "
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in
various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of
Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on
Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty
years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their
appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he
was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance,
and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds
of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for
personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was
impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the
Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted
with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately,
although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.
Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoological
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoological Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley. " Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientele_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his
garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that
he was careless of comfort and health. Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of
Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos,
Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was? ), were
as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities
of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu. He read insatiably before starting all the
recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw;
and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary
interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations. And he had his reward.
It is not any ordinary journalist and sketcher who could have compelled
from Tennyson such a tribute as lines "To E. L. on his Travels in Greece":--
"Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
"Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there. "
Lear was a man to whom, as to Tennyson's Ulysses,
"All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world. "
After settling at San Remo, and when he was nearly sixty years old, he
determined to visit India and Ceylon. He started once and failed, being
taken so ill at Suez that he was obliged to return. The next year he
succeeded, and brought away some thousands of drawings of the most striking
views from all three Presidencies and from the tropical island. His
appetite for travel continued to grow with what it fed upon; and although
he hated a long sea-voyage, he used seriously to contemplate as possible a
visit to relations in New Zealand. It may safely, however, be averred that
no considerations would have tempted him to visit the Arctic regions.
A hard-working life, checkered by the odd adventures which happen
to the odd and the adventurous and pass over the commonplace; a
career brightened by the high appreciation of unimpeachable
critics; lightened, till of late, by the pleasant society and good
wishes of innumerable friends; saddened by the growing pressure of
ill health and solitude; cheered by his constant trust in the love
and sympathy of those who knew him best, however far away,--such
was the life of Edward Lear.
--_The London Saturday Review,_ Feb. 4, 1888.
Among the writers who have striven with varying success during the last
thirty or forty years to awaken the merriment of the "rising generation" of
the time being, Mr. Edward Lear occupies the first place in seniority, if
not in merit. The parent of modern nonsense-writers, he is distinguished
from all his followers and imitators by the superior consistency with which
he has adhered to his aim,--that of amusing his readers by fantastic
absurdities, as void of vulgarity or cynicism as they are incapable of
being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into
sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation.
He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they
are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous
appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of
a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even
melodious--or, as he would say, _meloobious_--while to all these
qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of
pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the
laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest
designs. Generally speaking, these designs are, as it were, an idealization
of the efforts of a clever child; but now and then--as in the case of the
nonsense-botany--Mr. Lear reminds us what a genuine and graceful artist he
really is. The advantage to a humorist of being able to illustrate his own
text has been shown in the case of Thackeray and Mr. W. S. Gilbert, to
mention two familiar examples; but in no other instance of such a
combination have we discovered such geniality as is to be found in the
nonsense-pictures of Mr. Lear. We have spoken above of the melodiousness of
Mr. Lear's verses, a quality which renders them excellently suitable for
musical setting, and which has not escaped the notice of the author
himself. We have also heard effective arrangements, presumably by other
composers, of the adventures of the Table and the Chair, and of the cruise
of the Owl and the Pussy-cat,--the latter introduced into the "drawing-room
entertainment" of one of the followers of John Parry. Indeed, in these days
of adaptations, it is to be wondered at that no enterprising librettist has
attempted to build a children's comic opera out of the materials supplied
in the four books with which we are now concerned. The first of these,
originally published in 1846, and brought out in an enlarged form in 1863,
is exclusively devoted to nonsense-verses of one type. Mr. Lear is careful
to disclaim the credit of having created this type, for he tells us in the
preface to his third book that "the lines beginning, 'There was an old man
of Tobago,' were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse
leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures. " Dismissing
the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago,"
we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as
exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a
favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as
it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for "owls" in the
third line:
"There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard! '"
With the kindly fatalism which is the distinctive note of the foregoing
stanza, the sentiment of our next extract is in vivid contrast:--
"There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was terribly bored by a bee;
When they said, 'Does it buzz? ' he replied, 'Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee. '"
To the foregoing verse an historic interest attaches, if, that is, we are
right in supposing it to have inspired Mr. Gilbert with his famous
"Nonsense-Rhyme in Blank Verse. " We quote from memory:--
"There was an Old Man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, 'Does it hurt? ' he replied, 'No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet! '"
Passing over the lines referring to the "Young Person" of Crete to whom the
epithet "ombliferous" is applied, we may be pardoned--on the ground of the
geographical proximity of the two countries named--for quoting together two
stanzas which in reality are separated by a good many pages:--
"There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the doors queezed her flat, she exclaimed, 'What of that? '
This courageous young person of Norway. "
"There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, 'Weedon Station! ' she made no observation,
But thought she should go back to Sweden. "
A noticeable feature about this first book, and one which we think is
peculiar to it, is the harsh treatment which the eccentricities of the
inhabitants of certain towns appear to have met with at the hands of their
fellow-residents. No less than three people are "smashed,"--the Old Man of
Whitehaven "who danced a quadrille with a Raven;" the Old Person of Buda;
and the Old Man with a gong "who bumped at it all the day long," though in
the last-named case we admit that there was considerable provocation.
Before quitting the first "Nonsense-Book," we would point out that it
contains one or two forms that are interesting; for instance, "scroobious,"
which we take to be a Portmanteau word, and "spickle-speckled," a favorite
form of reduplication with Mr. Lear, and of which the best specimen occurs
in his last book, "He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled the bell. " The second book,
published in 1871, shows Mr. Lear in the maturity of sweet desipience, and
will perhaps remain the favorite volume of the four to grown-up readers.
The nonsense-songs are all good, and "The Story of the Four little Children
who went Round the World" is the most exquisite piece of imaginative
absurdity that the present writer is acquainted with. But before coming to
that, let us quote a few lines from "The Jumblies," who, as all the world
knows, went to sea in a sieve:--
"They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-Daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve. _
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, 'How tall they've grown!
For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore. '"
From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist
making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability
to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:--
"So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air! '
"But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
"Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon! '
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds. "
"The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World" follows
next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while
on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate
persons who have not perused the original: "During the day-time Violet
chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her
three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter,
which it seldom if ever did. " After journeying for a time, they saw some
land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high. " In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found. "
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells. " This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust . . . suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers . . . till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite. "
In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense. " In this
volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum. " In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--
"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.
The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further
quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following
set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr.
Lear's books has drawn up for us:--
1. What do you gather from a study of Mr. Lear's works to
have been the prevalent characteristics of the inhabitants of
Gretna, Prague, Thermopylae, Wick, and Hong Kong?
2. State briefly what historical events are connected with
Ischia, Chertsey, Whitehaven, Boulak, and Jellibolee.
3. Comment, with illustrations, upon Mr. Lear's use of the
following words: Runcible, propitious, dolomphious, borascible,
fizzgiggious, himmeltanious, tumble-dum-down, spongetaneous.
4. Enumerate accurately all the animals who lived on the
Quangle Wangle's Hat, and explain how the Quangle Wangle
was enabled at once to enlighten his five travelling companions
as to the true nature of the Co-operative Cauliflower.
5. What were the names of the five daughters of the Old
Person of China, and what was the purpose for which the
Old Man of the Dargle purchased six barrels of Gargle?
6. Collect notices of King Xerxes in Mr. Lear's works, and
state your theory, if you have any, as to the character and
appearance of Nupiter Piffkin.
7.
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Title: Nonsense Books
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NONSENSE BOOKS
by
EDWARD LEAR
With all the Original Illustrations
1894
PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.
The first _Book of Nonsense_ was published in 1846. Three other volumes,--
_Nonsense Songs, Stories, etc. _, published in 1871; _More Nonsense
Pictures, etc. _, in 1872; and _Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense,
etc. _, in 1877,--comprise all the "Nonsense Books" written by Mr. Lear.
"Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books
yet produced is the _Book of Nonsense_, with its corollary
carols, inimitable and refreshing, and perfect in rhythm.
I really don't know any author to whom I am half so
grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put
him first of my hundred authors. "
JOHN RUSKIN,
In the _List of the Best Hundred Authors_.
[Illustration: EDWARD LEAR. ENGRAVED BY ANDREW FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN
SAN REMO, BY RONCAROLO. ]
CONTENTS.
I. A BOOK OF NONSENSE.
II. NONSENSE SONGS, STORIES, BOTANY, AND ALPHABETS.
III. MORE NONSENSE PICTURES, RHYMES, BOTANY, ETC.
IV. LAUGHABLE LYRICS:
A FRESH BOOK OF NONSENSE POEMS, SONGS, BOTANY, ETC.
[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT. ]
The following lines by Mr. Lear were written for a young lady of his
acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady not of his
acquaintance,
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlor,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, "He's come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh! "
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in
various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of
Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on
Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty
years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their
appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he
was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance,
and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds
of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for
personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was
impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the
Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted
with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately,
although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.
Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoological
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoological Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley. " Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientele_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his
garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that
he was careless of comfort and health. Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of
Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos,
Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was? ), were
as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities
of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu. He read insatiably before starting all the
recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw;
and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary
interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations. And he had his reward.
It is not any ordinary journalist and sketcher who could have compelled
from Tennyson such a tribute as lines "To E. L. on his Travels in Greece":--
"Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
"Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there. "
Lear was a man to whom, as to Tennyson's Ulysses,
"All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world. "
After settling at San Remo, and when he was nearly sixty years old, he
determined to visit India and Ceylon. He started once and failed, being
taken so ill at Suez that he was obliged to return. The next year he
succeeded, and brought away some thousands of drawings of the most striking
views from all three Presidencies and from the tropical island. His
appetite for travel continued to grow with what it fed upon; and although
he hated a long sea-voyage, he used seriously to contemplate as possible a
visit to relations in New Zealand. It may safely, however, be averred that
no considerations would have tempted him to visit the Arctic regions.
A hard-working life, checkered by the odd adventures which happen
to the odd and the adventurous and pass over the commonplace; a
career brightened by the high appreciation of unimpeachable
critics; lightened, till of late, by the pleasant society and good
wishes of innumerable friends; saddened by the growing pressure of
ill health and solitude; cheered by his constant trust in the love
and sympathy of those who knew him best, however far away,--such
was the life of Edward Lear.
--_The London Saturday Review,_ Feb. 4, 1888.
Among the writers who have striven with varying success during the last
thirty or forty years to awaken the merriment of the "rising generation" of
the time being, Mr. Edward Lear occupies the first place in seniority, if
not in merit. The parent of modern nonsense-writers, he is distinguished
from all his followers and imitators by the superior consistency with which
he has adhered to his aim,--that of amusing his readers by fantastic
absurdities, as void of vulgarity or cynicism as they are incapable of
being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into
sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation.
He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they
are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous
appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of
a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even
melodious--or, as he would say, _meloobious_--while to all these
qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of
pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the
laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest
designs. Generally speaking, these designs are, as it were, an idealization
of the efforts of a clever child; but now and then--as in the case of the
nonsense-botany--Mr. Lear reminds us what a genuine and graceful artist he
really is. The advantage to a humorist of being able to illustrate his own
text has been shown in the case of Thackeray and Mr. W. S. Gilbert, to
mention two familiar examples; but in no other instance of such a
combination have we discovered such geniality as is to be found in the
nonsense-pictures of Mr. Lear. We have spoken above of the melodiousness of
Mr. Lear's verses, a quality which renders them excellently suitable for
musical setting, and which has not escaped the notice of the author
himself. We have also heard effective arrangements, presumably by other
composers, of the adventures of the Table and the Chair, and of the cruise
of the Owl and the Pussy-cat,--the latter introduced into the "drawing-room
entertainment" of one of the followers of John Parry. Indeed, in these days
of adaptations, it is to be wondered at that no enterprising librettist has
attempted to build a children's comic opera out of the materials supplied
in the four books with which we are now concerned. The first of these,
originally published in 1846, and brought out in an enlarged form in 1863,
is exclusively devoted to nonsense-verses of one type. Mr. Lear is careful
to disclaim the credit of having created this type, for he tells us in the
preface to his third book that "the lines beginning, 'There was an old man
of Tobago,' were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse
leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures. " Dismissing
the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago,"
we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as
exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a
favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as
it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for "owls" in the
third line:
"There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard! '"
With the kindly fatalism which is the distinctive note of the foregoing
stanza, the sentiment of our next extract is in vivid contrast:--
"There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was terribly bored by a bee;
When they said, 'Does it buzz? ' he replied, 'Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee. '"
To the foregoing verse an historic interest attaches, if, that is, we are
right in supposing it to have inspired Mr. Gilbert with his famous
"Nonsense-Rhyme in Blank Verse. " We quote from memory:--
"There was an Old Man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, 'Does it hurt? ' he replied, 'No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet! '"
Passing over the lines referring to the "Young Person" of Crete to whom the
epithet "ombliferous" is applied, we may be pardoned--on the ground of the
geographical proximity of the two countries named--for quoting together two
stanzas which in reality are separated by a good many pages:--
"There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the doors queezed her flat, she exclaimed, 'What of that? '
This courageous young person of Norway. "
"There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, 'Weedon Station! ' she made no observation,
But thought she should go back to Sweden. "
A noticeable feature about this first book, and one which we think is
peculiar to it, is the harsh treatment which the eccentricities of the
inhabitants of certain towns appear to have met with at the hands of their
fellow-residents. No less than three people are "smashed,"--the Old Man of
Whitehaven "who danced a quadrille with a Raven;" the Old Person of Buda;
and the Old Man with a gong "who bumped at it all the day long," though in
the last-named case we admit that there was considerable provocation.
Before quitting the first "Nonsense-Book," we would point out that it
contains one or two forms that are interesting; for instance, "scroobious,"
which we take to be a Portmanteau word, and "spickle-speckled," a favorite
form of reduplication with Mr. Lear, and of which the best specimen occurs
in his last book, "He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled the bell. " The second book,
published in 1871, shows Mr. Lear in the maturity of sweet desipience, and
will perhaps remain the favorite volume of the four to grown-up readers.
The nonsense-songs are all good, and "The Story of the Four little Children
who went Round the World" is the most exquisite piece of imaginative
absurdity that the present writer is acquainted with. But before coming to
that, let us quote a few lines from "The Jumblies," who, as all the world
knows, went to sea in a sieve:--
"They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-Daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve. _
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, 'How tall they've grown!
For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore. '"
From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist
making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability
to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:--
"So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air! '
"But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
"Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon! '
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds. "
"The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World" follows
next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while
on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate
persons who have not perused the original: "During the day-time Violet
chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her
three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter,
which it seldom if ever did. " After journeying for a time, they saw some
land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high. " In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found. "
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells. " This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust . . . suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers . . . till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite. "
In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense. " In this
volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum. " In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--
"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.
The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further
quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following
set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr.
Lear's books has drawn up for us:--
1. What do you gather from a study of Mr. Lear's works to
have been the prevalent characteristics of the inhabitants of
Gretna, Prague, Thermopylae, Wick, and Hong Kong?
2. State briefly what historical events are connected with
Ischia, Chertsey, Whitehaven, Boulak, and Jellibolee.
3. Comment, with illustrations, upon Mr. Lear's use of the
following words: Runcible, propitious, dolomphious, borascible,
fizzgiggious, himmeltanious, tumble-dum-down, spongetaneous.
4. Enumerate accurately all the animals who lived on the
Quangle Wangle's Hat, and explain how the Quangle Wangle
was enabled at once to enlighten his five travelling companions
as to the true nature of the Co-operative Cauliflower.
5. What were the names of the five daughters of the Old
Person of China, and what was the purpose for which the
Old Man of the Dargle purchased six barrels of Gargle?
6. Collect notices of King Xerxes in Mr. Lear's works, and
state your theory, if you have any, as to the character and
appearance of Nupiter Piffkin.
7. Draw pictures of the Plum-pudding flea, and the Moppsikon
Floppsikon Bear, and state by whom waterproof tubs
were first used.
8.
